With the advent of inexpensive, portable digital imaging devices, there has been a dramatic growth of digital images captured. In addition, since the capture of digital images no longer require the cost of film and the corresponding printing of the film images, there are little constraints to the number of images that can be taken with digital devices. Multi-gigabyte camera cards and near terabyte computer hard drives enable the retention of digital image files more than ever before. However, the viewing of these images still requires time to comprehend the context and subject of digital images. A computer slide show is able to present a mere fraction of a typical image collection in the duration that a consumer is willing to sit and watch the images fade in and out on a screen. Yet even when playing a slide show, it is difficult to view images that are not displayed in proper sequencing or in context with others.
Furthermore, organizing images for viewing is a time consuming task that few are willing to take on. Although tagging of images enables key words to be searched using basic search engines, there still remains a need for the indexing of image content in conjunction with the playback and visualization of these images in context from one's image collection. In addition, it is an unmet need for presenting images that are logically related with each other in a manner that emphasizes certain images over others. Moreover, a large number of images should be cued and presented simultaneously in a rapid manner using an entertaining animation to take advantage of the peripheral vision of a viewer without compromising a viewer's comprehension of the visual content. It is the purpose of this invention to overcome these deficiencies over the current state of the art.